because of its
very waywardness and disregard of values. Here was no thing of trick and
limelight. It was Blake's "Infant Joy" materialized. She was a poem.

In the heated theatre, where the opiate air rolled like a fog, we sat
entranced before her--the child, elfish and gay and hungry for the
beauty of life; the child, lit by a glamorous light. Far below the
surface this light burns, and seldom is its presence revealed, save by
those children who live very close to Nature: gipsy and forest children.
But every child possesses it, whether bred in the whispering wood or
among sweetstuff shops and the Highbury 'buses; and I, for one,
recognized it immediately this lovely child carried it over the
footlights of the Lyceum Theatre.

Hither and thither she drifted like a white snowflake, but all the time
... dancing; and one had a sense of dumb amazement that so frail a
child, her fair arms and legs as slender as a flower-stem, should so
fill that stage and hold the rapt attention of a theatreful of people.
Here was evidence of something stronger than mere mastery of ballet
technique. Perfect her dancing was. There was no touch of that automatic
movement so noticeable in most child dancers. When she went thus or so,
or flitted from side to side of the stage, she clearly knew just why she
did it, why she went up-stage instead of down. But she had more than
mere technical perfection: she had personality, that strange,
intangible something so rare in the danseuse, that wanders over the
footlights. The turn of a foot, the swift side look, the awakening
smile, the nice lifting of an eyebrow--these things were spontaneous. No
amount of rehearsal or managerial thought could have produced effects so
brilliantly true to the moment.

I am not exaggerating. I am speaking quite literally when I say that,
for me, at that time, Marjorie Carpenter and her dancing were the
loveliest things in London. She danced as no child has ever danced
before or since, though, of course, it would never do to say so. It was
the most fragile, most evanescent genius that London had seen; and
nobody cared, nobody recognized it. It attracted no more attention that
the work of any other child-actress. Yet you never saw such gazelle-like
swiftness and grace.

When she had completed one dance, a new back-cloth fell, and she danced
again and yet again. I forget what she danced, but it spoke to me of a
thousand forgotten things of childhood. I know that I touc